Clarification on rules and moderation

[PervySageChuck]

I have always been an ardent opponent of ANY form of censorship, no matter how offensive it might be. I personally take the position that if I read something that I find offensive, I can either respectfully respond and explain why... Or I can just ignore it.

Alternatively, and this is my preferred method of dealing with offensive material, I can learn NOT to be so petty that the words, pictures or images of someone else' offensive behavior can upset me. This policy has given me much more happiness and far less unhappiness or anger. I highly recommend this method to everyone.

 

[rh75]

You can't force morality on people as history has shown.

The problem is that you have 3 groups of people:

1. People who post crass comments and don't care about your opinion of them. Nothing you say or do will stop them from posting certain comments.
2. People who are neutral. They for the most part are fine with what is posted. Except when actual racism, sexism, and bigotry is displayed.
3. People who find offense in anyone or anything that don't share their beliefs.

The problematic group is the last one as they have no qualm about silencing those who don't follow their morals.
After all, they are right and justified in their actions because their targets are sexists, racists, blah blah blah.


What I would do is moderate the comments directed towards real people and have real bigotry in them.
The problem is anyone can claim to be a female, black, Muslim, gay and no one can prove otherwise on this site.
For the comments about fictional people who will never be living, I wouldn't do anything.

Finally, if you moderate everything you have to do it all.
Example: demeaning comments against men have to be treated like demeaning comments towards women.

Once you start down the path to forcing morality on people, you can't exclude certain groups.
All or none.

 

[TMW]

Forcing morality on people has nothing to do with it. It's just a matter of telling people to leave their drama at home. This is a manga scanlation site. Why should it be used as a platform for political or religious views or personal beefs between groups? All of these groups have access to Twitter, websites, Facebook, Discord, Reddit, etc. They're not being censored. All it would be is Mangadex saying "We're neutral. Leave us out of your drama, and leave the drama at home."

A truly neutral site would be a place where people don't use the site to throw shit at each other. As it stands now, Mangadex is already a site where the most-persistent and loudest shit-throwers have driven people away. Regardless of where you stand on who was right/wrong in the yelling match, that's not neutral. Neutral would have been for the yelling match to have been left on the sites of the various parties involved.

 

[Raikiri]

Time to wrap this up and call it a day :3

 

[bambou1991]

Rapeman did nothing wrong.

 

[traveling_chef]

I mean Mangadex wishes to keep growing their userbase, If I as a new user came to check out some manga, liked the story enough that I wanted to know what others maybe think, but found the comments full of "f*gg*t" "wh*re" "N*gg*r" I don't think I'd want to stay here. it's not being petty to say I wouldn't want to involve myself in a site that allows or promotes such behavior, from its reader base or its scanalators.

 

[dancingoncrocodiles]

i didnt read most of this but i will punch the next nazi or mra i meet irl

 

[Acolytus]

@traveling_chef But the staff is already doing that. Maybe not with "whore" because it can be used as a general insult but the only times I have seen the staff intervene, it was because someone used a racial or anti-homosexual slur.

There is a lot of vitrol in the comment sections, but that's usually due to the chapter's contents and there is nothing wrong with that.

The only time the comment sections get derrailed into non-manga related shitflinging is when the credits page brings it up or a bunch of people feel like sharing their unrelated opinions there.

 

[Sullieman]

@traveling_chef
>"f*gg*t" "wh*re" "N*gg*r"

There's is a serious problem when you can't even write faggot, nigger, whore to make a point. What matter is intent, are calling someone a nigger as insult? Then yes, they should get a punishment, are you calling some "you are mah nigger" as a form of jokingly calling someone your friend? Why would care they such language towards each other? People are so damn think skinned these days. And that's the problem, people, from my point of view, will try to use their morals to judge you, to try and call you out for not believing the same things they do, and that's fucking retarded. The same applies to calling a fictional character a whore and what not, the responsibility of looking retarded is theirs and theirs only, if they make a fool out of themselves serves them right, if they are joking, once again, why would you care? As long as MD says they care about limiting freedom of speech as little as possible there's only one thing to do, ignore what you don't like like any sane person would do.

 

[petra]

I didn't know people actually read credit pages.

 

[Paradoxicull]

Like many others have commented, I think that scanlation comments pages should be held to the same standard as forum comments, and they should keep their beef at home. They do more to derail comments than any commentor ever could, and the drama just ramps up exponentially the longer you leave them unchecked.

For the love of god, though, don't make rules against "sniping". At its base, regardless of intent and effect, scanlating is still stealing someone's work, editing it, and, if you are getting donations, technically profiting off of it without their permission. Most of these series won't get translated at all, but to be a scanlator is to be an art thief, that's just the nature of the job. How can you claim someone is stealing your work when it's not your work to begin with?

TL;DR: If groups want to create drama over sniping or whatever else, fine, but they and their uploads should be kept to the same community standards as they would be kept to on the forums, perhaps slightly harsher in consideration of how much forum drama is generated entirely by scanlation groups.

 

[Paradoxicull]

@petra if people want to create drama on their credits pages they tend to put it front and center in big bold letters and start it off with a hook. They really want your attention.

Some people do just read credits pages though, I certainly do.

 

[Keetonman]

Again, I think it's fine currently. I don't comment that much, just a bit every now and then (2 or 3 manga at a time and then I go silent for a while). Buuuuuut, please keep moderation apolitical.

 

[traveling_chef]

@Sullieman to be fair I am not talking about someone just using the term, I censored myself so I didn't any problems, I have no problems with someone using the insulting terms as jokes or ironically. but using those kinds of terms as jokes is much harder over text with basically strangers as compared to with your own close group of friends.

@Acolytus I'm also not saying the staff AREN'T doing anything about it and I know they can;t be everywhere, check the comments for Fechippuru there are definitely some pretty not cool comments there that haven't been moderated. Specifically around chapter 4-8

my point still stands if MD wants to be open to more people they don't want visitors first impressions of their community to be racist, sexist, bigot assholes, from both the commentors AND scanlators , they should probably crack down on the people who are pushing that kind of hate.

 

[definitionofinsanity]

@Captaininvictus

Lotta real awful chan posters making terrible meme posts and scanlators making rape/racist/misogynistic jokes in their credits pages, too. Cracking down on that sort of thing would be cool.

You have a block option. Fucking use it. This type of thinking is... a terrible idea. First of all, I have never seen comments like "SHE ISN'T A VIRGIN, SHE OUGHTA BE RAPED" or... whatever... anywhere. And believe me I've looked at a LOT of comment sections for individual chapters on MD. Second of all, "terrible meme post" are subjective. The only thing I can think of that comes close to that is Rapeman, who is more just funny and edgy than actually saying terrible shit. If you don't like it, you surely don't have to read it.

By all means, be the person that gets the likes of /a/nonymous scanlations to not release on MD anymore simply because chans, memes and edgy jokes make you so very uncomfortable. (And given the subject matter of some manga, it's also rather hypocritical/a double standard).
I suspect you're a grown ass adult, so how about not asking Mangadex to protect you from yourself? If you don't like something, instead of calling for it to be censored which usually just pisses off people and makes a situation worse, why not utilize the block that Mangadex spent time and effort to incorporate to let you not see content from bad people with bad opinions that make you uncomfortable?

When I said "perhaps let's not emulate the shittier parts of Bato" this type of thinking, justification and "but I dun like it, make it go away!" stances are exactly that. The moment someone forces you to read Rapeman releases and to read his credits pages (which are just edgy memes that really shouldn't be offending or outraging you) by force, then maybe I'll agree with you. Until then I'm not really going to tolerate outrage mob mentality and censorship. And, yes, slippery slope does pertain here. We're seen in past years how the regressive left is willing to politicalize and weaponize censorship under the guise of social justice or standards. We live in a world where people are actually debating whether the OK sign is a secret hand gesture for white supremacists or if Pepe the frog is the next swastika. And where even questioning that means you're an alt-right nazi.

Does that sound extreme? Like conspiracy nonsense? Well, the fact that it has happened and the fact that you want subjective standards put in place to censor people is basically a gigantic god damn red flag to me indicating that such measures could only be abused and corrupted to use against people that some don't like to shut them up. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

...So we could set up the Mangadex Inquisition/Gestapo... or you could use the fucking block button and not read certain scanlation group releases. Hmm... Which has the least possible chance of going terribly, terribly wrong?

 

[definitionofinsanity]

@traveling_chef @Sullieman
Wait, what? Is "whore" actually censored? (EDIT: Thank god, it's not) ...What if a character in a manga actually calls themselves a whore? What if they are proud that they are a whore and they are "taking that word back" like certain other words in lexicon (I've always hated that argument, especially when the people that aren't reclaiming it are dictating whether it's "okay" or not to use it.)?

And then there's the issue that whore can easily be used in the context of shill or sell-out and have ABSOLUTELY ZERO gender or sexual connotation to the word.
Ugh. Please pull this planet over to the side of the road and lemme get off. I don't want to be on it anymore.

 

[Keetonman]

What you're doing right there is just gonna attract more of those "ever so dreaded Hacker 4Chan" folks.

Words are words, good god. Don't like it, you have options to not see it. As you can see with what's happening on YouTube, calling for more censorship only leads to you being censored too.

 

[Temai]

im quiet happy with the current situation - in regards to loopholes that could or are know to cause issues i would still recommend looking in to them and checking to see what other people think and see if we can close them or define them better to sort issues out but that is something i would expect noramly.

overall people cry about none issues a lot now days - needs more of the old school sticks and stones or as one australian doctor said put some concrete in your coffee and thought the fuck up

 

[strat_five]

@PervySageChuck
Apparently being offended by racism is being petty? wtf

 

[TMW]

A new reader has found a manga they enjoy and they're happily reading through it when they stumble into the so-called credits page: "OSAMA BIN LADEN DID NOTHING WRONG LOL U MAD BRO". They decide not to risk reading any more manga on Mangadex. This is bad for Mangadex.

The Elusive Taco asks someone on Twitter if they can translate their work and post it to Mangadex. The creator looks at other works that have been posted and sees they're loaded with so-called credits pages filled with angry political memes. They say "no", and also potentially "Please remove everything else of mine from this site or I'll call a lawyer". This is bad for Mangadex.

A scanlator finds that some group has been filling their so-called credits page with insults and trash-talk about them. They go to the forums to ask if there's anything they can do about it and the place is full of people shrieking that they just need to shut up and grow a thicker skin. The scanlator pulls their stuff from Mangadex. This is bad for Mangadex.

Stright up, letting drama queens fill the manga here full of personal beefs and trolling will be bad for Mangadex. If Mangadex can't expand its user and donor base, Mangadex will either have to stop expanding the amount of material it hosts or it will have to turn to ads to cover costs. I like Mangadex without ads and data scrapping.